World War Z Trailer

Any fan of the zombie genre worth their salt will at least know of World War Z.. in a world where zombies are now an overused and somewhat tired (but still tremendously popular) monster, it actually offered an interesting take on the zombie apocalypse both in its scope and its narrative style. Rather than the usual, struggling-to-stop-the-infection or ragtag-group-of-survivors-must-reach-safety that have been done a hundred times a piece, it took the perspective of a writer chronicling the tales of people AFTER humanity had survived the catastrophic effect of the titular zombie war.

It's really the logical conclusion of the Romero ideal, where the slow moving zombies are merely an external means by which to expedite internal conflict. Except that this story plays out on a global setting and we're perceiving the world through a number of very different individual (and at times, unreliable) perspectives. In a genre which has inexorably moved toward the more immediately threatening running zombies since 28 Days Later, World War Z was a good way of showing a (relatively) realistic scenario for the way the slow mving undead might be able to almost destroy mankind.

So, naturally the film adaptation was ALWAYS going to be fraught with problems and the production seems to have done little but lurch from one disaster to another, enduring serious amounts of rewriting and reshooting - something that would almost certainly have sunk a film with a lower budget or less star power. Regardless of these problems, the trailer has just been released!

And while trailers are by no means a good way to judge a film, this seems judged to systematically disabuse anyone of the notion that this is based on the source material in anything but name alone. First of all, this is set  at the BEGINNING of a zombie apocalypse - not at its end. Secondly, these zombies are not the slow shambling kind - they're track and field zombies ON STEROIDS. Hell, these zombies look like they could outrun a car! Thirdly, from the looks of things... this isn't going to be a multi-faceted narrative, it's going to be a vehicle for Brad Pitt single handedly saving the world. That's not exactly surprising and is one of the reasons why an A-lister was always going to be a bad idea.

The most notable thing is how TERRIBLE the special effects in the trailer are - for a film with a budget of $125m you'd expect something good. If these are actual effects in the cut that is released... just, wow. We're talking about the kind of effects people cringed at in The Mummy and those looked better AND had the excuse of being from 1999. We're talking about zombies behaving like some kind of gigantic kind of giant ball that has properties of a liquid and a gas... it's truly bizarre and sticks out like a sore thumb. All the WORST excesses, everything that people complain about when it comes to CGI... this trailer seems to almost perfectly sum it up.

It's hard to know exactly what this film will be like but if this is the best it has to offer then it looks as if Paul W.S. Anderson is in for some stiff competition as regards bad big budget zombie films...